“What do you mean, Peter?”
“I mean, Joanna’s chucked me. You and I get along famously, you’ve got your divorce from Neal. Why not marry me?”
It was plain that though surprised she liked the idea. She saw herself suddenly transformed in this inhospitable snobbish city from Maggie Neal, alone and déclassée, into Mrs. Peter Bye, a model of respectability.
That he had no money, no accepted means of making a livelihood she understood would mean nothing. He was a Bye and she as his wife could go anywhere. She would show Alice Talbert! And afterwards when he got his degree!
But because she had once loved Philip she could judge what Peter might mean to Joanna. To her credit she hesitated.
“Joanna probably doesn’t mean to let you go, Peter, she’s just angry and disappointed. She takes things harder than Sylvia or I. You know she really cares about you, and so do you about her.”
But he assured her that he did not. “She’s too exacting. Now there’s one thing about you, Maggie—maybe it’s because you’ve already been married—you know how to treat a man. Joanna makes you feel as though you were in a straitjacket all the time. I always feel ordinary when I’m with you.”
Neither of them noticed the doubtfulness of the compliment. In the end she accepted him. After all, she owed nothing to Joanna, who certainly had not considered her. How surprised she would be to think that Peter could so quickly find solace in her—Maggie’s—arms! And Joanna should learn, too, that he could become a success without everlastingly being pushed and prodded.
Hard on this thought came another. “Peter, you won’t have to work so hard now to get through school. I’ll help you. You know I’m doing very well with the hair-work.”
He dismissed the theme airily, one hand on her shoulder, the other fumbling for a cigarette.
“Oh, I’m going to give medicine up. I’ll just keep on with Tom and the music. Heavens, it’s so nice to know you won’t mind, Maggie. Can’t think why I’ve stuck to the old school as long as I have, when here I am all set with this nice easy job to my hand. Might as well get along with as little trouble as possible. The world owes me a living.”
Afterwards, back in his room with the green iron bedstead and the Bye Bible, he felt a difference, a sense of let-downness. He threw himself across the bed and groaned, “Joanna, how could you?”
She could, that was evident. He was stupefied at the turn in his affairs. Five hours ago he had expected some day to be a physician and to marry Joanna Marshall. Now it seemed that he was going to be a musician and marry Maggie Neal.
“It isn’t true,” he told himself, fiercely. But it was true. There on the dresser were some cookies wrapped up in a red and white fringed napkin, Maggie’s gift when he left her.
“I made them for you, hoping you would come in. Now you’ll be in often, often, won’t you? Oh, Peter, I’ll be good to you. I’ll be as unlike Joanna as possible.” He did not want her to be unlike Joanna. In fact, he did not want her at all.
He might as well take her, though, for Joanna did not want him. That was it, no matter how many women he unaccountably married, Joanna might be shocked but she would never really care. Or suppose she did care a little while, she would soon forget it with her singing and dancing. Still, he supposed he must tell her. He would write her a gay, mocking letter. “I hope you’ll be as happy with your art as I feel I shall be with Maggie. She suits me perfectly.”
After he had littered his desk and the floor beside it vainly with a veritable snowstorm of torn bits of paper, he let his head drop on his lean brown hands and went to sleep. Perhaps it would not be exact to say he cried himself to sleep, but there were certainly tears that burnt and scalded behind his eyelids.
His landlady complained of the torn paper the next morning. “ ’Tisn’t as though you didn’t have a nice wastepaper basket ready and waitin’, Mr. Bye.” As she finished speaking she handed him Joanna’s letter containing Goethe’s poem. The tenderness, the real love that blazed in the beautiful lines overwhelmed him. He could not tell her the truth after a letter like that. So he wrote her, postponing but hinting, he fondly believed, at the news which he must soon break to her. A month later, finding himself still unequal to the task, he wrote to Sylvia.
XX
Sylvia had written. “He doesn’t mean it, of course”—
But Joanna knew better. Even while dumbfounded she stood staring at the note, trying to believe there must be some mistake, her heart, her every sense was telling her it was too true.
Peter had given her up. He was going to marry Maggie. He had given her up. That was the important thing. For if he was not to marry her, what difference did it make whom he married?
She had never been religious, she had never been dramatic. Rather she somewhat despised any emphatically emotional display. “People don’t really act that way,” she told herself.
Yet she dropped on her knees beside the pine bedstead in the sparsely furnished room. Her hands clutched at the counterpane. She could feel her throat constricting. A scalding hotness seared her nostrils, her mouth became dry, her eyeballs burned.
“Oh, God! Oh, Peter!” She repeated the two phrases again and again in a sick agony.
“God, you couldn’t let it be true. You know I always loved him, I didn’t hide it from you. You knew my heart.”
At first she thought she would go to him. Then the fear that he might not want to see her, might even refuse to see her, overcame her. That humiliation she could
